


My White Knight (River City Junction)

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: AU, F/F, Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-29
Updated: 2011-04-29
Packaged: 2017-10-18 18:57:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/192150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a small town, with a soda fountain, and a bandstand in the park. And a foil-wrapped whorehouse. And a young doctor whose kid sister plays the piano. And a running gun battle. And a parade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My White Knight (River City Junction)

1  
"Well, at least no one got shot," Kaylee said, huffing a little as she lowered her corner of the last crate. Out of habit, she placed her feet carefully as she stepped. Then she jingled the coin in the pocket of her overalls, and smiled. "And who knows what's in these boxes? Could be somethin' very, very special."

Jayne glowered at her.

"I recall something that one of my friendly competitors once said," Shepherd Book intoned. "A rabbi, of great age and wisdom. One of his congregants complained about his crowded home. The rabbi asked him if he had a cow. The man said yes, so the rabbi told him to go home and put the cow in the kitchen. The next week, after services, the man was near to beside himself with rage. He said he couldn't stand the smell or the filth any more. The rabbi stroked his long white beard, deliberated, and told the man to take the cow **out** of the kitchen. And the next week, the man embraced him, full of gratitude, because of the improved atmosphere…"

"Except that I shoveled a lot less shit than I expected to, I ain't chalkin' this one in the win column," Jayne said. Because, once the cattle were delivered, Mal had expected a friendly discussion culminating in the payment of rather less coin than the inflated price he had quoted for the job. However, what actually ensued was an enforced choice between loading the cattle back up again (of course, they had eaten up the feed that he carefully budgeted) and finding somewhere else to sell them, or taking the contents of the cartons in trade. It was him, Zoe, and Jayne against eight strapping cattlemen each armed with a shotgun, so Mal decided to go for the Lucky Dip instead of betting their lives.

One might think that, as a former cattleman himself, Mal would have looked at the output as well as the input side of the equation. Yet, it took him several days of an unexpectedly clean cargo bay before he wondered if he was transporting a breed of mutant or experimental cattle that somehow failed to turn crops into flops.

It was at that point that he discovered that Inara, Kaylee, and Zoe, acting on Inara's entrepreneurial impulse, had cornered the cowshit market. Inara designed the label ("Captain Reynolds' Finest"), Kaylee lithographed the bags, and she and Zoe packaged the material for delivery to the gardens at the Companion House on St. Alban's, where they were already obligated to deliver the Shepherd for his Order's annual convocation.

"Hey, 'Nara!" Mal said. "You took three weeks of manure offa me."

"Repeatedly," Inara said, flicking the fringe of her shawl over her shoulder. "And every time I thought I detected a marginal change, you reverted and the cycle began again." That brought down the house.

"Thought by now you'd all figured out that all the Comedy Stylings belong to the Captain," Mal said.

"Hey!" Wash said.

"Untwist your knickers, all of you, we got real eggs and real tomatoes for supper. And I made pie," Kaylee said.

:"What kind?" Jayne asked.

The Shepherd started to say something about gift horses when Kaylee said "Cow! Considerin' that that's where I got the money for that can of shortenin'…"

"Saw you carryin' that in," Mal said. "But I figured that 'Nara hooped you into some of her Wiles, only on a lower socio-economic plane."

"That was unkind, Captain," the Shepherd said. "And surely you have no call to be unkind to **Kaylee.**

2  
After supper, Mal insisted on doing a white-glove inspection of the dishes after they were washed, forestalled future crew conflicts over the last piece of pie by eating it himself, and, once everyone had cleared off, looked inside the cartons.

"Huh!" he said. Memories, some of them happy, came flooding back.

The next morning, Mal browsed through the local papers on the Cortex. "This Marcellus Washburn any relation to you?"

Wash scrunched up his face to calculate. "Third cousin, twice removed. Once for buncombe, once for Grand Theft Spaceship. Ran a chop shop."

"Prolly the same fella, then. Knew him in the War. If we ain't got a job on, mayhaps we should swing on over there 'round U-Day. Have some fun, throw a little business his way buyin' things for Kaylee."

"The thing about small towns," Wash said feelingly, remembering the impulses that had sent him skyward, "Is how frickin' boring they are, everyone knowing your business and all."

3  
When Dr. Sebastian Temperley moved to town he made a point of using most of his severely depleted savings to buy a great deal of bulky, heavy medical equipment. (The citizenry were grateful enough to have a supplement and eventual replacement for Doc Billings, who was getting pretty vague, to courteously avoid finding out what had landed him such a backwater. The general opinion was that it was either drug addiction or some sort of sexual scandal.) The equipment had to be outmoded for him to be able to afford it at all, and little of it was very useful, but he didn't want anybody to be suspicious at the sight of large crates.

The second large crate to arrive contained a piano. For several months, the doctor spent every day patching up the ills that afflicted the small town's merchants and the nearby farmers. He thought it was much less interesting than his previous job as a Capital City trauma surgeon.

He didn't know anyone in town, which was the way he thought it had to be. Every evening, he did a mediocre job of preparing an elaborate repast from a second-hand cookbook that he'd bought at the Ladies' Aid Relief Sale. As each summer day turned to twilight, he sat in the parlor (hideously wallpapered with trellised blue hyacinths) on the bench of a piano he couldn't play. When it got dark enough, he pressed the button for the gas mantle next to the stairs, and went upstairs to the smaller bedroom.

He had saved the larger bedroom for his sister Ri—Regina. He hoped that she would like the way he decorated it, but he didn't know what girls liked these days. He hadn't seen her for nearly three years and hadn't had the opportunity to discuss anything as harmless as what corteclips she wanted in the captureframe over her bed.

The third large crate had to be delivered surreptitiously. First, a farm cart took the crate from the Wells Fargo wagon to a place deep in the woods. Simon, desperately hoping that his buggy, and its burden of mostly-empty steamer trunks, wouldn't be noticed, slipped through the back roads. (He had purchased a third-hand Stanley Steamer that wasn't running so much, in the hope that fixing it up would be therapeutic for River.)

The objective of surgical training is to make sure that nothing will startle its possessor ever again, but Simon couldn't discipline the claymore mines in his chest or the rushing in his ears when he broke the crate open with a crowbar and set the dials on the cryocrate. If everything had gone well, then the gradual trip would have given her time to equilibrate. All the literature warned about the very real danger of Cryo Shock and its long-ranging psychiatric effects.

Simon dressed River up in starched white, her hair pinned up beneath a huge hat trimmed with wax fruit (the modiste recommended one with a stuffed bird, but Simon was afraid that it would frighten River). Once he brushed the dried leaves off his flannel trousers, they made a pantomime of driving away from the train station in the buggy, just as the evening train had left, trusting that everyone would remember seeing her get off the train. "Boarding school," she said, her snub nose in the air, whenever anybody asked.

River obviously was parsecs from all right, but she refused to talk about what had happened at the Academy. She insisted on contributing to their small household. She took over the preparation of food on such evenings as no hopeful young lady had left a hotdish, although Simon was never sure if the resulting molecular gastronomy reflected a fashion he didn't know about, or mental illness.

Once River had tuned the piano, she also insisted on earning a few credits here and there giving piano lessons.

4  
"Wash, if ya wanna come along to family reunionfy, you can—Zoe, I think it'll be safe enough—but the rest of you, just stay put. I got this one covered."

Jayne, Zoe, Wash, Book, and Kaylee stared at Mal with deep suspicion.

"I think I'll…you know…pass," Wash said. "I mean, it'll be mostly low-grade intoxicants and war stories, neh?"

"Okay, then, just stay on the ship, everybody. I'll be back later tonight, maybe tomorrow morning."

"Hey, Cap'n," Kaylee said, "They got boy-whores at the brothel in town. Looked it up on the Cortex when you said we was comin' here. Isn't that thoughtful? It's called the Heart of Gold. Real sparkly."

Wash looked over at the Cortex screen. "That's just insulation and passive solar."

"This is work, Kaylee," Mal said. "I didn't come here lookin' for tasty."

"How'd you know there was a…house of ill-repute in town?" Wash asked.

Jayne answered for Kaylee. "Soon's you got more'n about six folks in town, you get your types. One of 'em's the bossman, one's the storekeeper, one's the hooker, one's the preacher. Once you get up to, maybe, two hundred, you start in with the schoolmarm and the doc."

5  
Inara peered through the lacy curtains protecting the shop window. Unsophisticated as they were, some of the hats were rather pretty. When she opened the door, the bell hung behind the door tinkled. Inara closed the door gently, and looked around the shop. Only her training prevented her from gasping. Memories, some of them happy, came flooding back.

"Hello, Inara," Nandi said. She re-adjusted a toque trimmed with peacock feathers, handed over a credit chip, and sat still, looking in the mirror at Inara behind her as the hat was ceremoniously swathed in crinkly pink tissue and embedded in a striped lavender hatbox. "Well, as you can see, this is where I ended up," she said. "And yourself?"

"I rent a shuttle in a…" (after all those years, Inara somehow felt unable to lie to her once beloved friend) "well, I suppose you'd have to call it a smuggling ship."

"Still in the Guild?"

"Of course!...I mean, yes."

"Bet you can guess I'm not."

"The Dulcimer Incident was the talk of the Incense Ceremony the year you left the Training House."

"I'm still in the Pleasure and Surcease business, " Nandi said. "Just…in a somewhat more informal setting. Well, I suppose an important personage such as yourself must have an appointment even on this unpromising chunk of rock."

"No…please…Let's talk," Inara said, color rushing to her face.

"Well, saloon's open, but this early in the day, I suspicion you'd rather have a cup o'joe," Nandi said. "Case I'm wrong about that, I got a flask in my reticule."

They moved down the street to Taft's Coffee Bar and Confectionary, gracefully hiding the awkwardness they felt from the scandalized looks and ears standing at attention to hear every wicked nuance of their conversation. There was a moment when it looked like the respectable ladies were going to sweep out in a flurry of protest, leaving the place to Inara and Nandi. At the last moment, a respectable matron stage-whispered the ancient Earthen proverb, "But then the Terrorists will have won!" and they all bobbed down like a flock of hens on a clutch of eggs.

The unexpected reunion was difficult enough for Inara and Nandi without the gallery of goggling onlookers, so as soon as each had swallowed half of a tiny cup of coffee and pushed a few crumbs around on her plate, Inara said, "Well, there is your…establishment. I don't think we would be disturbed there."

Defiantly arm in arm, Nandi and Inara strode to the outskirts of town and to the Heart of Gold. "It's not much, but it's a House that is not a Home," Nandi said. "And, anyway, whatever didn't go into exterior decoration is either passed along in value to clients or flows through to the bottom line. Inside, it's a first-class parlor house, pension scheme and everything."

Inara had to laugh. "Half the time, I don't think Mal even pays his crew of desperadoes, much less set anything aside for the future." What chimed through her head was that he didn't expect them to have one, and for once in his foolish life he was probably right. "Too bad for him that he lacks your business acumen."

"Desperadoes, you say? Too bad for me that I lack his firepower! Inara, I know you're embarrassed to see me…"

"Not at all! How can you say that, dear?"

"…but maybe this meeting was providential. If, as you say, your captain needs money, and I know for certain fact I need help, then maybe it was meant to be."

"Nandi, what's the problem?"

"Men!" Nandi said bitterly. "Oh, I know I couldn't run a business just on my lady clients, but sometimes men who don't know which brain to think with make me wish I was sellin'…I don't know, whisky or sacks of nails or lawn fertilizer."

"I wish I'd known about your ambitions," Inara said. "I would have been in a position to solve **all** your problems. I know you can't go to the Guild, situated as you are. But what about the law? If you've been threatened, or harmed."

"Well, considering that it's the Mayor, and not coincidentally the richest man in town! So what I need is someone brave. And strong. And…ephemeral. Someone who'll teach Rance Burgess a lesson, and then fly off like the Devil's got his tail. You work out of a ship, so that's one problem solved right there." Nandi started talking faster, excited by the plan forming in her mind. "Those smugglers of yours can help me if they've got guns, and brains at all…"

"They've got guns," Inara said. "There's certainly plenty of room on board. How many, ah, employees do you have? Pack up the strongbox, any fetish equipment that would be hard to replace, have everyone take just one suitcase, and we can be en route before Rance Burgess knows what hit him."

"Oh, Inara, I'm not going to cut and run. This is my place. Built it up out of nothing, and if it gets known that I fled the first time some needle-dick bastard stamped his tiny foot, then it'd be just the same the next rock I landed on and tried to start up again. This is where I am, and this is where I'm making my stand. If you can't stand tall, it's time to point your boots upward anyhow."

"Yes, that sounds just like Mal," Inara said bitterly.

"Is there going to be a problem with the captain?" asked Nandi, who had heard that tone before (and could probably carry it on her books as a capital asset). "Is he…well, is he your fancy-piece?"

"That'll be the day! It's strictly a business arrangement, I can assure you of that. And you must have forgotten a lot, to think that if I took a fancy-piece at all, that it would be a man."

"People change. They have a vision of how things will be, what their life will be like, and then the corners get worn down and the spangles fall off..."

"The sadder but wiser girl's the girl for me," Inara whispered.

6  
Wash, bursting with pride, promenaded through the park with Zoe's kid-gloved hand tucked through his linen-clad arm. He had bought her a slinky suit of cream-colored pongee, and a leghorn picture hat trimmed with purple grosgrain ribbon.

To their great surprise, they saw Mal perched on a crate in the bandstand. They quickly concealed themselves in the shrubbery.

"Well, I know all you folks are the right kind of parents," Mal said. "I'm going to be frank with you, perfectly frank. You got trouble, my friends. Right here in River City. Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with B and that stands for Bordello. Y'all got a whorehouse here in town. Not a wholesome Companion House, but a tin-foil-wrapped parlor of hellfire where they set down right on the…Make your blood boil? Well, I should say. And you wanna know what kind of conversation goes on in that whorehouse? Subversive conversation! Conversation takin' advantage of minor linguistic confusion 'tween 'lliance and lyin' liars. Even though it's near to U-day, bitchin' all about how the 'lliance strands its settlers out on mostly-dead rocks and steals 'em blind if'n they manage to make a go of it, and how when folks stand up on their hind legs to protest, they get squashed flatter'n a bug 'neath a steam hammer. One fine night, they leave the shadow puppet show, headed for the dance at the Armory, grab your sons, your daughters, in the arms of a jungle animal instinct…"

"Well, what are **you** gonna do about it?" shouted someone who, to Mal's amazement, wasn't Marcellus.

"Way to stamp out dissent is to nip it in the bud. Get 'em out of the bawdy house parlor, into the bandshell, kill two birds with one stone. River City needs a boys' band…River City's gonna have a boys' band," Mal replied to the call. "Friends, the idle brain is the Devil's playground…"

"That seems to be an entirely new field of criminous endeavor for the Captain," Wash whispered. "Anything you've ever seen before?"

"New to me," Zoe said.

"Why's he keep goin' on about a **boys'** band?" Wash asked.

"Gotta be because the males are more prone to various forms of damn foolishness. Like thinkin' anythin' called a hobble skirt is a good idea." She got to her feet cautiously, dusting off the knees of her suit as Mal wound up with, "Remember the Maine! Plymouth Rock! And the Golden Rule!"

7  
Inara went back to Serenity and waited for Mal to get back from wherever he was and whatever he was doing. "I've never asked you for anything. I'd **hate** to ask you for anything. So…I'm not asking." Inara took a roll of bills out of the small beaded bag that hung from a chain below her kid-gloved hand. "I'll stand surety if Nandi doesn't pay you, like Badger…or Patience…or Hashimoto…or…

"Dunno if I even need this play," Mal said. "Got work of my own. Who's the client, anyway?"

"A friend of mine from my training days."

"Why's a lacy-pants Companion need help from a low-minded peasant type like me?"

"She's not a Companion," Inara said. "She's a madam. Of a whorehouse."

Mal blinked. "You mean there really is one? I mean, Kaylee said there was, but I wasn't rightly sure if I'd made it up."

"Yes, there really is one. And Nandi's in trouble."

"Don't know these folks. Don't know if I care to know 'em."

"They're people who are trying to get by and earn their way, and a cruel man thinks that because he's rich, he can put his foot on their necks."

"I'm in," Mal said. "Give me the coordinates, I'll have a look-round when I'm out deli…doing…stuff."

8  
In an agony of impatience, Simon waited for Marigold Van Vliet to finish her piano lesson and go the hell home. Once she did, a chain of events could occur. Nicky could climb out of the treehouse and into the open window of Simon's bedroom. River could earn the bribe that she had agreed, with much eye-rolling and a hideous leer, to accept for spending a couple of hours in the Public Library. It was not much of a hardship for her—she was only halfway through the gold-trimmed set of Balzac in soft red leather.

"But why do I have to study music theory, Miss Temperley?" Marigold pouted. "It's so boring!"

"A good understanding of theory means that you can adapt what you know about music to any kind of instrument," River said.

"I don't even know why I have to sit in the parlor playing the piano," Marigold said. "That's boring too."

River, who had a predilection for the flugelhorn herself, could understand that. "Someday, you'll play the big tuba," River said. "And not in the parlor, either."

9  
Wash unwrapped the utility belt from his waist, ready to do the maintenance checks on the mule. What with the whole mule not being there and all thing, he couldn't, although he would have had plenty of elbow room because the mysterious new crates weren't there anymore. He was going to ask Mal where it was but didn't see him in any of the usual haunts (although the iron in the laundry room was still hot) and couldn't raise him on Comm, so Wash put two and two together, although he still didn't know what the hell Mal was up to.

10  
Simon returned from the icebox (he had mixed up a couple of cherry phosphates) and pointedly put the cold, beaded glasses down on coasters on the bedside table.

"Ye gods, Temp, I know you dasn't be seen goin' into the Heart of Gold where them Ladies' Auxiliary bitches can see ya, but anyway, I'm glad this is an outcall," Nicky said. "The atmosphere at the house is just poisonous. Y'know, the Mayor's wife is barren, so he's got a real thing about havin' a son. He's been havin' to do with Petalene—she's one of our girls—and now she's come up in the family way, and Mayor's practically been struttin' round town handin' out half-dollar seegars. Speakin' of which, she's awful near her time. Could you come and help her have it? Nandi says she'll comp you…well, for three months, anyhows…if you will."

Simon grinned. If he managed to deliver Petalene's baby, thus risking the wrath of the town's most powerful and affluent citizen, he thought he'd probably be pretty horny afterwards. He was a little worried about conflict of interest, considering that the Mayor had already crossed the threshold of his office once already.

11  
"You shouldn't be here!" Nandi said. "I don't know if it's this morning, or next but..they'll come in the morning."

"Of course," Inara said. "They'll have to see to shoot." She wondered briefly about night scopes but decided they probably would be in short supply on this one-horse moon.

Nandi cupped a hand to Inara's cheek. "You'd better go back to your shuttle now, while it's still…while it might still be safe. I'll have a couple of my boys escort you back."

"I'm not going anywhere," Inara said, leaning into the caress and drawing Nandi to her.  
"The locked garden," Inara said. "Now I know where I lost the key. And to learn that again is worth everything or anything."

Nandi took a gold-threaded scarf from a drawer, bent her head, and covered her hair. "I'm going to make an offering and light some incense in thanks for sending you back to me. If the world ends tonight, I'd be proud to lie here beside you. In my bed, or in my grave."

12  
Mal drove the mule back to Serenity, assigned Jayne and Zoe to breaking down the crates (waste not, want not) and explained the situation. As he expected, he got more volunteers than he needed, and had to tell Wash to stay behind and be ready to shake a tailfeather on a moment's notice, and tell Kaylee yet again that not everybody was meant to spend their life between the ass end of a gun and the mouth of another.

Jayne drove the mule back again. Mal calculated a perimeter, set up motion alarms and fire extinguishers, and assigned Zoe and Book to patrol outside, himself and Jayne inside.

"Where's the lady of the house?" Mal asked the thin girl with a smooth, round face and old, odd eyes. If asked at that point, he would have deduced that she worked there, but it didn't really cross his mind to wonder.

"Upstairs fixing the hurricane shutters," the girl said. "Why don't you go through there and help the doctor? Destruction's under control here, we're on it, Creation is a holiday for you. Not a busman's."

"Ma'am, yes ma'am," Mal said, heading toward the groans. He was used to taking orders, from the commander when he had to, and when someone really seemed to be in charge, when he didn't.

13  
"Business seems to be good 'round here," Mal said to a straight back clad in a white shirt, facing away from Mal and toward the washstand with its rose-patterned china pitcher and bowl.

"I don't suppose any of them has to worry about being laid off," Simon said absently, scrubbing his hands with extra care because of the far-from-sterile conditions. He had never done a home birth before, and was rather apprehensive about the lack of equipment or blood replacement or even saline or staff or…well, anything except a laboring woman who kept suggesting (ever-higher on the scale and decibel level) knocking her out and just lifting out the baby and putting some ma into ma-shang.

"Petalene, I don't have very many drugs with me," he said. "If I give you too much, then it'll slow down the labor, and we'd all like your baby to arrive sooner rather than later." (So I can get to work sewing up the war wounded, Simon thought.) "And if I give you a lot too much, or the wrong stuff, it could hurt the baby."

"Well, right now, what I'm worryin' about is what's hurtin' me, so just get 'er done," Petalene said.

Simon patted her shoulder. "I know you want this baby. If you didn't, we could…well, we'd all be in the parlor putting our feet up."

"Depends on your definition of parlor," Mal said. "Or what you're puttin' your feet up on."

"I don't want that cock-knocker to have it," Petalene said. "Less you got in life, more you hate to get it took away, specially by folks gave you no call to care for 'em. Sure, I'm a whore, but he's a pig, and he didn't have to be a pig just to buy grits and groceries."

River drifted into the room, without knocking. "Feet first," she said. "I advise podalic version."

"Really?" Simon said.

"Prescience is frequently post-science," she said. "That's Captain Malcolm Reynolds."

Simon bowed his head in greeting and asked pardon for not shaking the Captain's hand. The view out of the corner of his eye looked interesting, but he turned his concentration back to work.

"I'm glad you're here," he said. "Petalene, the Captain and I are each going to take one of your arms, help you move around the room. That should ease your pains a little, and perhaps help the baby turn around, and be in the easiest position for being born."

They walked Petalene around the floor for a while, until she broke away and headed back to the bed.

"What do we do now?" Mal asked.

"Well, mostly what we do, is wait," Simon said.

14  
"All clear," Zoe said. Book rose, and Zoe sat down near the small hooded stove that shed a little warmth in the chilly night. She rubbed her hands, then poured a thick slurry of coffee from the speckled metal pot on top of the stove hood.

"So, Shepherd, you OK with the tactics here?"

"I don't know…I was never a Regular Army man," Book said disingenuously. He could tell that Zoe wasn't buying.

"Never would've married him if he hadn't said he don't want kids," Zoe said. "Says he's afraid of the competition. Could be less of a joke in that than he knows. But what he don't know, what them that sat out the War don't think on, is that it wasn't just our history got stolen, it was our posterity. In fact I'm wonderin' if the Mayor of this fine burg is a veteran. Win or lose, the poison floated down on one and all. Damn few of us—who fought on either side—can catch pregnant or make a baby at all, and some of what we can, is monsters. You expect rich folks not to have too many head of children, it'd stop 'em passin' along the family millions. But poor folks…we're always goin' places that are quiet as death, when you'd think there'd be a dozen ankle-biters underfoot."

"And is that why you and the Captain were never romantically involved?" Book asked.

Zoe shrugged. "Shootin' blanks at a barren rock? Didn't seem like much of a chance, so we said we'd aim our noses elsewhere. I struck lucky, Cap'n never did." Zoe left it at that, having no great opinion of the tolerance of organized religion for diversity.

Zoe rubbed her leather-gloved hands together and coiled down in a single graceful move to sit on the ground. "Been in battles for stupider reasons. Usually on account of some man's agenda. Wouldn't kill me to have another woman's back this once. Well, less'n it does kill me, of course."

15  
Mal came back from walking the perimeter. All clear. He offered to take the Shepherd's place, so the older man could go inside and warm up and have some chow, but Book declined.

Mal went to the kitchen, and saw the doctor, his hands wrapped around a bowl of tea, a few cold dumplings on a plate in front of him. Now that the gloves were off, Mal thought that he had handsome hands. Strong.

"How's your patient doing?"

"Asleep," Simon said. "Fortunately. I don't have enough sedatives, much less ones that are safe for labor, or analgesics, or…anything."

"Sleepin'? Is that normal, all this goin' on?"

"Perfectly," Simon said. "It's hard work, after all. And we've concealed the…ah, the military aspects of the situation…"

"It's quiet in here just now," Mal said, helping himself from the pot of lamb stew on the back of the stove. Bread looked fresh, too. Life of luxury.

Then a shout broached the still air. "Yeah, baby, yeah! Like that!" Jayne shouted.

Mal shrugged. "Looks like we ain't just **eatin'** 'em out of house and home." After treating himself to a moment's visualization, Mal reminded himself that crew involvements were never worth the trouble they brought. He found it hard to imagine Jayne actually turning down a free blowjob from a genuine non-Reaver human being, and he had certainly given mature consideration to providing one, but he knew that Jayne would take it in entirely the wrong spirit.

"My sister was right," Simon said. "When Petalene wakes up, I'm going to ask your help to support her shoulders while she's on her hands and knees. I'm going to try to turn the baby around."

"Aw, hell," Mal said. "We used to do that all the time with cattle. Didn't know you could do it with folks."

"It doesn't always work," Simon said.

"Well, it better had, or they'd have to send for a surgeon, and how're they gonna do that?"

"I **am** a surgeon," Simon said.

Mal held up his hand. "Hey, no offense meant, I wasn't to know."

Simon leaned forward, his elbows on the table, pinched the bridge of his nose, and then sat up straight again. "Quite apart from everything else, I don't want to have to do a c-sec…wound healing would make it difficult for Petalene in the immediate intrapartum period. And I daresay that a large abdominal scar would be, ah, bad for business. So if I can, I want to be able to manage childbirth naturally. Look, do you want to try for a few hours' sleep?"

"Hell, no, my folks ain't sleepin' and so I ain't till I know they're all safe. What're you doin' here, in this mess, anyway?"

"It's not the baby's fault," Simon said. "There are, there are, basic principles of decency, and everyone deserves…treatment. And care. To be cared about, cared for, taken care of. Under calmer circumstances, Nandi would have brought Petalene to my office—this isn't the sort of place to have even a cottage hospital—but, well, I don't suppose you'd know what it's like to have to make do with just what's available. My sister called you Captain…"

"How the diyu'd she know, anyway?"

"Well, she knows things. …Captain of what, I don't know, but you have people to do your beck and call, and all kinds of, I don't know, machinery and things, you're not stuck out on a rock with nothing but your hands and it's never enough…You didn't have to start all over again, from nothing."

"Nothing? You sit there with your clean shirt and your white hands and you have the infernal nerve to talk to me about nothing? Least you got a home to go to."

"Now, that's just where you'd be wrong," Simon said.

"Maybe you can't go to it, but it ain't a dead rock melted down like the Devil's own paperweight," Mal said.

River came into the kitchen, took a half-eaten dumpling off Simon's plate, dunked it through the gravy in Mal's bowl of lamb stew, and gulped it down whole. Then she wrapped the long scarf tighter around her neck, flopped her head on the side, and made a quite gruesome face with her tongue sticking out. "When you're flipping Jonah around like a poached egg in lightly acidulated water, make sure you unwrap the cord," she said. She smiled, and, as a Parthian shot, said, "I'm glad you're getting along so well."

"'Jonah'?" Simon said. "I was hoping for some advance on the hamster."

"Where the hell are you?" Petalene yelled, and Simon went back to her room, scrubbed up again, and put on one of his last two remaining pairs of gloves. When Mal came in, he sent him back to the kitchen to get some more water, and asked him to help him turn Petalene around and then sent him out for some more sheets as drapes and then because he'd seen as many movies as anyone else and was dying for a cup of tea he couldn't have, he sent Mal back to the kitchen to boil some water.

"Excellent news!" Simon said. "Version was successful, the baby is now in a normal presentation, so we're very nearly finished, and your baby will be born soon!"

"How soon's soon?" Petalene asked.

"Oh, I'm willing to bet that it'll be…within three hours! Maybe even two!"

"Whyn't you kill him for me?" Petalene asked Mal. "Don't feel up to doin' it myself."

16  
They came in the morning.

The motion detector went off, and Simon went outside, without taking the time to wash the blood off his gloves or his shirt. "Here's the DNA profile," he said, unfolding the paper drawn from his trouser pocket. "This is your blood. This is the fetal sample you submitted. Well, now he's a baby. A very healthy boy, by the way. You might even say strapping. This bar is Petalene's blood. And the bottom line is the probability that that woman and that man could have fathered that child. The probability is zero."

Mayor Burgess stared at the piece of paper in his hand. Then he crumpled it angrily. "Take that whorehouse, boys," he said to the six heavily-armed men who surrounded him. "Kill everyone in it, then torch it. Burn it to the ground." He slowly crumbled the paper until he had a pellet in his fist, not a paper in his hand.

Simon stared, aghast, praying for a means to take back his words and make him not—once again—have ruined the situation beyond repair.

One of the men picked up an old beer bottle from the ground, filled it from the gas can in his knapsack, and started to stuff in the wick. The firehose wielded by the Shepherd sent the bottle flying, and the one wielded by Zoe sent him sprawling.

Four of the men's hats zoomed off their heads, and, when retrieved, each proved to have a bullet hole front and back, neat as if someone wanted to punch in grommets and hang the hats from a clothesline.

"Baby ain't yours, Mayor Burgess," one of them said. "What's the percentage in us gettin' ourselves killed just for some whore's get that'll be turnin' tricks in ten year's time anyhow?"

Inside the house, River pirouetted back to the mirror that she had used to line up the shots. "Don't tell Simon," she said.

Jayne figured he didn't know nobody named Simon and at that rate he sure wasn't going to go out looking for one. "You got my solemn oath," he said. He took a closer look at the girl—there was an oddsomeness about her, for all her being cute-looking—and decided not to even think about it, Helen had made him feel mighty took-care-of.

"All right, I'll go myself," Burgess said.

:A neat ring of bullet holes stitched the dirt in a ring around him.

"Shootin' like that, bet there's a platoon at least," said the town treasurer. "If they're smart, they'll have air cover comin' in later, too. Lot for one man to handle. Oh, by the way, battery's low on that new-fangled shootin' iron o'yours."

"You're fired!" the Mayor bellowed.

"Civil service job," the treasurer said. "Y'all comin? We rode on in on the city's car, and it's a fair piece back to town if you're walkin'."

17  
"Y'all right? You're lookin' pale," Mal said when Simon came back in and checked the shutters. "Mother and baby still sleepin' like a—well, they're out for the count. What was all that about? Alarm went, and I thought I heard shots."

"You're not wrong about that. It was the Mayor and his merry band of hoodlums."

"Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You mean they did try to come in here for the baby?"

"Never got that far. I…thought I gave them a persuasive reason to leave. But it didn't work that way…"

"Yeah, I been there a few times," Mal said feelingly.

"But before they could work any mayhem, I'm not sure who was shooting, but when they realized they were under fire, they cut and ran. No casualties inside, I made sure of that."

"What'd you do to persuade 'em? Or try at it, anyway."

What do you think Burgess did when he got that DNA sample?"

"Brought it to a doctor for analysis?"

"Bingo. I don't think he can read a chromrep any more than a giraffe can play Calvinball, but I just deleted the 1 and the first zero from the percentage probability, and had R…Regina…my sister…go back through my computer to make sure that the original couldn't be traced."

"Why'd you do that?" Mal asked. He knew very well what the doctor's sister's name was, when he was checking up on his own warrants he could read everybody else's perfectly fine. He thought that, even tired and all, Simon looked a lot handsomer in person than in a mugshot, but then that practically went without saying. Worse than passport captures.

"I don't like being pushed around," Simon said. "I've seen the way some people behave to young girls, and I won't stand for it."

"Mister," Mal said, "You're my kind of stupid."

"Doctor," Simon said at the earliest opportunity.

18  
The next few days were, in one sense, something of an anti-climax. There were no further military actions at the Heart of Gold, although Mal and Nandi thought it was a good idea to post Zoe and Wash as guards just in case. Nandi assigned them the room with the big, saggy brass bed, the layers of silk-and-velvet crazyquilts, and the mirror on the ceiling. They were so dedicated that, except for those two hours in the bathtub, they never left their post.

Nandi and Inara had tray meals sent up for them.

Inara was not the only absentee from Serenity, although the numbers were made up by Jayne bringing back Yekaterina from The Heart of Gold. He thought about bringing Helen, of course, but he decided that she was damn good at her job and he was glad she was there to do it but this wasn't no Plum Blossom Festival Cotillion and no point in pretending it was.

19  
Kaylee tapped demurely on the hatch to the Captain's cabin and then knocked harder when there was no answer.

Through training and experience, Simon was able to be awake and wearing his pants within three seconds of a summons, but the hatch took him a little longer. "Oh, hi, Kaytee," he said. "Can I help you?"

"Nothin' wrong with me, thanks," Kaylee said, wondering if Simon would be around long enough for a correction to be worth the trouble. {{What a waste}} she thought, then used the example of the lovely Companion to remind herself that it didn't have to be all one way or the other. Then she rebuked herself for even thinking about beating the Captain's time. "It's Mal, though. Mornin' after U-Day, and he ain't here, so we figure he busted up a bar somewheres and got bound by law. Got any money?"

"Some," Simon said.

"Well, town like this, we figure two hundred credits should do it." Simon grimaced, and said, "I'll stop off at home first, I should check on my sister anyway."

"Zoe reckons it'll set better if it's you that goes and bails him out," Kaylee said.

Actually, Zoe believed just the opposite, but she had a hangover and didn't have the money and figured that if Mal was going to make a damn fool of himself he should take the consequences, and the boy might as well see what he was letting himself in for. Zoe also said that what with getting mixed up with Mal and all, Dr. Tempusfugit or whatever his name was, well, his name was pretty much Mud in River City. Kaylee didn't pass this along, because she thought that anyone smart enough to be a doctor would gotta be really dumb not to be able to figure that out for himself.

20  
The crimson, gold-laced band uniform jackets were a pretty bad fit on Inara and Nandi, which distracted a lot of attention.

River, waiting at home, closed her eyes, concentrated, and struck a chord on the piano that she used for lessons.

Marigold Van Vliet took a deep breath and blew into the tuba she had been experimenting with.

Charley Tuggle bashed the drum around his neck first with the drumstick in his right hand, then with the left, then, ecstatically, with both.

Fillmore M. Gilroy III already knew how to play the flute.

River decided, screw the warrants, no point in letting everybody else have all the fun. She figured there would probably be a flugelhorn around somewhere, like Hope in the jar. Once she ran to the band shell, the raggle-taggle little group straightened up and formed into ranks. River cleared her throat and pulled a conductor's baton out of the pocket of her cardigan. Nandi pressed the Dulcimer setting on the portable synthesizer slung around her neck.

Then Jayne modestly took his place as the one and only bass, and they oom-pahed up and down the square.

21  
"Mrs. Burgess sure looks happy," Mal said, neatly folding the bedroll, leaving the jail cell as he would wish to find it.

"Well, uh, she just heard something…some piece of news…that she rushed off to tell all her friends…her minions."

"And what might that be?"

"Well, she asked why I'd come to get you out of here, if, you know, I had some kind of charitable interest in the rehabilitation of disreputable inebriates. And I said I didn't. And then she said that she had met my sister, who she characterized as a lovely young gentlewoman, and perhaps our family, like so many fine old families, had the misfortune to throw up a black sheep? And I said that good God no, you're not related to us. I mean, Yesooa! So she asked what you are to me anyway, and I said, 'the man I love,' and that was it."

In lieu of reacting directly, Mal said, "What I've learned is, when they say they're gonna spring you from the crossbar hotel, don't stand around waitin' lessen they change their mind."

"Kaytee said that you do this every year," Simon said.

"Name's Kaylee, with an l. Well, sure, U-Day, ain't but a little poke in eye for the Alliance, but still kinda fun."

"Hmmmph nevertheless," Simon said. "I mean, there are civilized standards of behavior for a reason…"

"Yeah," Mal said. "Life's tough, we need all the laughs we can get." Now that he was out of the jailhouse door and around the corner out of sight, he accelerated his prior dignified pace.

"By the way," Simon said, "You're not in any trouble about the thing with the musical instruments. Your friends turned up with at least a couple of dozen of the town kids, and my sister, and an assortment of musical instruments, and the Mayor was all set to swear out a fraud warrant, especially considering that he already knew where to serve it. But then they started making a godawful racket and the Mayor told them to cease and desist, they weren't going to get away with playing subversive songs on his watch. And then that beautiful brunette with the turned-up nose—you know, Nandi's girlfriend—put on her chocolatiest voice and said that if even an uncultured peasant could tell what they were playing, then presumably there was a band, and demonstrably there were instruments and uniforms, so precisely where did the fraud inhere? And he just sort of stood there and sputtered. So now that I paid the fine for your drunk-and-disorderly, you're free to go."

"I always think there's a band," Mal said comfortably.

**Author's Note:**

> For reasons that do not need explaining at this juncture, the episode "Heart of Gold" happens to occur during "The Music Man." Mal always thinks there's a band.


End file.
